About Web Analytics | Insider-SEO.com

What is Web Analytics?

Web analytics uses software to look at your website and report the number of clicks, time on a page, entrance and exit pages, cost-per-click, campaign costs, number of sales, conversion rates, revenue per sale, and total revenues. You can see which part of the web page is producing sales. It also shows you how long people look at a page so you know whether the page interests them. It presents this information in graphs and pie charts so you get a sense of trends and comparisons.

It's good to know numbers but it's better to compare numbers. Web analytics is about comparing campaigns, people, and time periods. This lets you find out who your visitors are and what they do at your site. Which advertising campaign (e-newsletters, unpaid search, Google Adwords, Overture PPC, MSN adCenter, and so on) brought the most visitors? Which group of people produced the most sales? Perhaps Google brought twice as many visitors, but Yahoo produced more sales. You can also set up A/B split tests to compare pages. You can also compare time periods, such as May against June, or the first quarter against the second quarter, and see what is rising or falling.

By knowing what your customers are doing, you can improve the website's structure, expand products or services they use, and delete or reduce items they don't use. This lets you reallocate your ad spend to improve results. You can see which campaigns, links, and pages have generated the most sales.

Analytics gives you knowledge so you can make informed changes. By knowing what works, you can improve that, and in a feedback loop, the process gets better and better.

Analytics gives you a competitive advantage. The vast majority of companies do not use web analytics. They don't know about it, it's technically beyond their skills, or they just don't have time. By cutting costs and improving the targeting of your advertising, you get increased sales and they won't.

Goals for Using Web Analytics

Use web analytics to accomplish a number of goals:

Compare pages by the amount of time, clicks, or conversions to see which are popular or not. You can test different versions of a page to see which version produces the best results.

Compare different groups of customers. Do East Coast customers prefer items to be on sale? Do West Coast customers buy the expensive model? Do Overture customers buy more than AdWords customers?

Compare time periods, such as months, quarters, or years against each other.

Compare campaigns (PPC, email, etc.) by clicks, signups, calls, or sales. Launch four campaigns, see which one brings the best results, and reallocate your ad spend accordingly.

Use funnel analysis to see how the customers are moving through the various steps in your process. This shows where they are leaving the process or which forks they are taking.

Compare the profits and ROI for campaigns, time periods, customer groups, and so on.

Web analytics also gives you a detailed look at the information in your traffic stream. The amount of time that visitors spend on each page (is the page interesting?), which keywords your customers are using to find you, their location (down to the city, state, or province), the day of week and time of day, and the popularity of the various links on your pages.

Reviews and Comparison of Analytics in the Book

In the book, we review three major analytics tools: Yahoo! Marketing Console, Google Analytics (formerly known as Urchin), and ClickTracks Analytics. We compare ease of use, technical requirements, capability (number of web pages it can handle), implementation, the difference in tagging vs. raw log files, hosting, customer support, and prices. The chapter concludes with a case study and an interview with the CEO of a web analytics company.

To learn more about analytics, read the ClickTracks Analytics FAQ.

Insider Blog

What is Web Analytics?

Goals for Using Web Analytics

Reviews and Comparison of Analytics in the Book

Knowledge Base